HowTo: Running Eagle CAD 6.2 on Ubuntu 12.04/12.10/13.04

Update: Eagle CAD version 6.4 is available which runs fine on Ubuntu 12.04., Ubuntu 12.10 and Ubuntu 13.04. I’ve made a small tutorial on how to fix possible dependency problems with this new version.

Ubuntu 12.04 only provides an older version of Eagle CAD, version 5.12.0 to be exact. A newer version 6.2 (32 bit) is available for download, but the installation fails due to the lack of a 32 bit libpng-1.4 library:

error while loading shared libraries: libpng14.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

Luckily, I found a detailed post at raek’s blog which covers older Ubuntu versions. Great parts of the following instruction were taken from this post and adapted for Ubuntu 12.04. Thanks!

First of all you need to install some packages to build the missing png library. Open a terminal window and enter on a 32 bit Ubuntu 12.04:

Then you need to fetch the libpng source code and the Eagle CAD 6.2 installer, either with “wget” (as I have done it) or directly from the respective webpages. A current version of Eagle CAD is available for download here: http://www.cadsoftusa.com/download-eagle/libpng 1.4 can be found on this page: http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
I will use the “/tmp/libpng-eagle” directory for building the library:

After the installation finishes, Eagle CAD will still not run unless you tell it where to find the png library we have just created. The easiest way to do this is by creating an executable start-up shell script (e.g. /home/$USER/eagle-6.2.0/eagle.sh) which contains the following commands:

Works with a brandnew Ubuntu 12.04 an the libpng1.4.12 instead of *.11
The older Version of libpng is no longer available at simplesystems.org. You only need to change 11 to 12 in wget command. Et voila: installed

This message appears if no ‘Makefile’ was generated or is present in your current directory. It’s hard to say what went wrong in your case. I would check the previous steps (especially ‘configure’) for any error messages. (And check, if you are in the correct directory when calling ‘make’.)

Great instructions, worked perfectly. Instead of creating a shell script to start Eagle I opted to copy the libpng14.so.14 to the same path as the current libpng since the name doesn’t clash and Eagle is linked against “libpng14.so.14” and not “libpng.so”. In my case I copied to “/lib/i386-linux-gnu/” and ran “ldconfig”. Running Kubuntu 12.04 64-bits.

Well, I can not describe a general way to create a desktop icon — whether this is possible or not depends on your desktop environment (Gnome,Unity,KDE, etc.). Creating the “eagle.desktop” as described should at least allow you to access Eagle through the program starter (the menu/pop-up you use to search an run other applications).

Hmm… Hard to say what exactly went wrong. At least the library is not where it should be (in the above case /tmp/libpng-eagle/install/lib/). Had one of the previous steps led to error messages? Did you try to use different paths and forgot to adapt them in one place?

Great instructions, worked perfectly. Installed flawlessly on my Ubuntu 12.04 64bit.
Yes when one comes to the section ” Unity/Gnome menu entry”, one must follow your advice, “(do not forget to adapt the $USER)” in the body of the script:
“/home/$USER/.local/share/applications/eagle.desktop”

If you have super-user access to your system, you can permanently install the libpng library by copying to the i386 system path. For my Ubuntu 12.04 system, that meant installing to /lib/i386-linux/gnu/. This would make the library accessible to all programs, and avoids needing the shell script to export the library path when invoking the program.

People tend to forget what libraries they have manually ‘installed’ as superuser. After some time they may be confused by cryptic package management messages or wrong library dependencies if there is a collision (meaning two packages/binaries rely on different versions of the same library).

I tried to install on debian 6.0.6 but it stops in “./eagle-lin-6.2.0.run”
the error is “/tmp/eagle-setup.6296/eagle-6.2.0/bin/eagle: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”.
I have no idea what does it mean ….
On Ubuntu 12.04 it works fine!

Hi, I haven’t tested the installation on native Debian systems, but you might be missing a library package on your system (the mentioned libssl 1.0.0). At least on Ubuntu systems packages named “libssl1.0.0” or “libssl1.0.0:i386” (depending on your system) are available. You can also check missing library dependencies with the “ldd” command, i.e. “ldd ./eagle” in the appropriate directory. Kai.

Hi Angelo. In case of the shell commands, it should not be necessary to replace $USER. It is a environment variable containing your login name. But you have to replace it in the ‘.desktop’ files. — Kai

Hi, thanx for that tipp. I’ve tried to install it on Ubuntu 14.04, and a few parts of it just works, but I managed it, and so I’d like to say, thank you. The only trouble I’ve got, I didn’t get the license-key to run, but it doesn’t matter. So long, and cheers Toni

Well, it gave directions.
However, I have found errors in this line :
wget ftp://ftp.simplesystems.org/pub/libpng/png/src/libpng14/libpng-1.4.12.tar.gz
The file was not there anymore. I have to download from other sources ( sourceforge.net ).
Also when I compiled libpng-1.4.12.tar.gz, I always got the 64-bit version. I don’t know why.
After I see the raek’s blog I use older version libpng-14.11.tar.gz. It can be compiled to 32-bit version.
After that I can run the installer program eagle-lin-6.2.0.run without errors.